Abstract. Neutron capture cross sections in the keV range are critical for understanding nucleosynthesis
in several important astrophysical environments. Certain key cross sections are also of
relevance to reactor performance and design and for nuclear forensics.
For decades. considerable effort has gone into measuring these cross sections
where possible and modeling them where not. Theoretical estimates of unknown
cross sections (usually using various statistical models combined with specific
structural and reaction input) are often quite uncertain especially when they
involve extrapolation to unknown cases. These limitations contribute to
ambiguities in understanding various nucleosynthetic processes and delineating
the sites where they occur. It is therefore of considerable importance to
develop an improved method to correlate known cross sections and to predict
new ones with higher accuracy and confidence. Here we present such a method,
newly developed, that is simple, empirical, robust, model independent, and based on
readily available empirical information. It can provide estimates of unknown cross
sections often with accuracies of 20–40%, often for nuclei even quite far from
stability, and often converts the estimation process from extrapolation to interpolation.